When an Alawite man and a Sunni woman put love to the test

We should opt for a more
genuine and balanced approach to identity, beginning with
acknowledging differences and their importance for our social
composition. العربية

A painting by the artist Tamam Azzam. Image is published under fair use, all rights reserved by the artist.Translated
by Pascale Menassa

This article forms part of a special series focused on Oral Culture
and Identity in Syria. It is the outcome of an ongoing partnership
between SyriaUntold and openDemocracy’s North Africa West Asia in a bid to untangle the roots of sectarian, ethnic and other divides in Syria.

I
was not aware of sectarianism in its theoretical sense when I moved
from Qalaat
al-Hosn to the mostly-Alawite Al-Zahraa neighbourhood in Homs City to
begin my university education. I had never experienced love in its
true meaning either. It was not until 2003 that I came across both
feelings.

The
situation appeared simple. On one side stood a Sunni girl (19) who
was extremely polite, obviously raised the Syrian mothers’ way we
know so well. On the other, there was Ibrahim (23). He was a joyous,
generous and surprising person.

I
had never met anyone like him. Ibrahim had golden skin, green eyes
and a smile I thought was the prettiest I had seen.

“I
love you” is an expression many girls dreamt of and its impact on
me was much greater than any evening prayer.

I
decided to keep my Sunni belief and that declaration of love that my
Alawi boyfriend repeated completely separate.

Ibrahim,
for his part, also tried to overlook the strictness of his religious
teachings and focused instead on the features of his Sunni
girlfriend’s face. He would systematically avoid any talk about
religion when we met and would try to distract us both from thinking
about the future.

A
few months into the relationship, he took me to visit his parents in
one of the villages of eastern Homs countryside. His father who was
in his 70s and had lived in the shadow of sectarianism did not make
an appearance. He could not stand to see me in his house. Still, he
allowed the visit and left. The rest of the family—his seven
brothers and their wives and children as well as his mother—gathered
to witness the utmost audacity of the veiled Sunni girl who had come
to meet them. This encounter went down in the annals of family
history: a young Alawite man and his Sunni girlfriend.

We
spent the next few months walking in Akrama in Homs discussing our
future naively. How will an Alawite man and a Sunni woman continue
down this path? Ibrahim would say he was ready to convert to Sunnism
if he had to. I was convinced he would, based on my conviction that
the right religious conversion is into Sunni Islam, whatever
someone’s initial religion may be!

I
set plans for Ibrahim’s conversion into Sunnism in motion by
collecting prayers and supplications
in an elegant notebook and repeating them daily. In my mind,
Ibrahim’s facial expressions were always constant. But, when I gave
him the notebook as a present, our sectarian upbringing manifested
itself for the first time. He asked me to take back my gift and never
offer him something of that nature again. The notebook only contained
daily prayers and glorifications, but it was the first trigger for an
endless discussion about the identities of Mohammad and Ali, and the
nature of their relationship, all based on what each had heard within
their religious community.

I
accepted the situation and thought only about love. To maintain our
relationship, I had to manoeuvre on another front—that of my
family, which was made up of conservative Sunnis (at least when it
came to social norms). My mother was devastated by the shocking news
that her daughter (a university student) had fallen in love and was
“going
astray.”

My
father’s opinion was quite different. My love story did not
unsettle him that much, but my boyfriend’s sect did. I still
remember his words, “An Alawite, you bitch?”

He
said it with an anger and condemnation I had never seen in him
before. I let my father down with this brazen openness to a sect we
fear and whose authority we dread. We repeat stories of thuggery,
theft and corruption about many of its followers. We know the limits
to our citizenship alongside them, and we know that on a scale of
importance, they always beat us.

We
are part of a subdued Sunni community that feels national inferiority
not only relative to Alawites, but also to all other sects,
especially the wide Christian entourage in Wadi
al-Nasara [Valley
of the Christians, an area in western Syria that is part of Homs
governorate, near Lebanon].

Until
the age of 19, sectarianism took a more benign form in my mind. It
was limited to noting the differences between us and our Christian
neighbours in the western countryside of Homs. As a minority
demographically, we always felt inferior to Christians (who were
cleaner, smarter, more polite, richer and backed by the regime). Oh,
how we felt we were treated unjustly! Many of us were convinced and
insisted that the afterlife was ours and ours alone. Everybody else
was astray.

I
even remember the first time I entered Saint George Monastery [Deir
Mar George] in the village of Al-Mishtaya during a field trip. I was
eight years old at the time. My cousin approached the walls of the
monastery and, together, we started reading the fatiha
[the first chapter of the Quran] because we had heard so often that
the stones of churches get nostalgic when hearing the Quran and the
name of God!

The
stories relating to Christianity and Christians did not end there. We
were told that when the priest drew the cross sign on the foreheads
of all teachers, they spent the next two days suffering from a strong
headache. One notorious teacher got off the hook, however, as she
refused to let the priest continue with this fake ritual.

Recalling
such situations brings to mind the proverbs my grandmother and other
women in the family would repeat. For example, “Let
him
be a muazzen
[Muslim prayer caller] in Zgharta! [a Christian region in Lebanon]”,
in reference to a person who stands out in a uniform environment; or
“Mobilize oh Aisha” when a woman generates sedition or is
treacherous [Aisha was a wife of the Muslim Prophet Mohammad].
My half-Lebanese grandmother who lived in a Shiite neighbourhood in
Lebanon would repeat this proverb, even though, had she thought about
it from a Sunni perspective, she would not have said it.

I also
remember my repeated visits to my sister who lived in the military
homes of Tafas, in the southern province of Daraa. I recall seeing
clear signs of that “hidden” sectarianism that spread fear in the
Syrian public sphere. Privilege was determined by one’s sectarian
affiliation, and at the top of the pyramid were Alawites. Sunni
and Ismaili women who were married to officers had more in common.
They knew their value, and they acted accordingly. Even so, their
relations with their Alawite neighbors represented a hard-earned
privilege and went as high as the ranking of their husbands.

And
I cannot forget one of my sister’s neighbors who loved my sister to
the extent of considering her house “the house of God. In other
words, a place so pleasant she wanted to visit or “perform
pilgrimage to daily”. Still, she did not flinch when scolding her
daughter in front of us and telling her “Damn that ominous face,
just like Abu Bakr’s!” [Abu Bakr was the first Muslim Caliph
after the death of the Prophet Muhammad].

All
this proves how deeply ingrained sectarianism is inside us. Even if
we choose to ignore this reality by not talking about it or naming
it, remembering our fellow Syrians proves how ingrained this feeling
is and even opens the door to freeing ourselves from such slogans as
“The Syrian People are One”. Instead, we should opt for a more
genuine and balanced approach to identity, beginning with
acknowledging differences and their importance for our social
composition.
We should ultimately realize that, indeed, there is a Syrian-Syrian
conflict stemming first and foremost from sectarianism, and it can
only be resolved by accepting sectarian differences, socially at
least.

About the author

Yasmine Merei is a Syrian journalist and poet, part of the SyriaUntold team, published in several Syrian and Arab media.

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